Cloud-native applications: Building scalable applications for modern business

Cloud-native applications represent a pivotal shift in how software is developed and deployed. Unlike traditional software, cloud-native applications take full advantage of cloud architecture and are purpose-built to maximize the unique benefits of the cloud environment. This article explains how cloud-native applications work, the advantages they offer and the essential principles guiding their development and deployment.

What are cloud-native applications?

Cloud-native applications are developed and deployed using a variety of self-contained processes and services, including DevOps, continuous delivery and continuous integration (CI/CD), containers, microservices and declarative APIs, all within the data cloud. This allows developers to deploy and scale components independently, enabling them to make frequent updates, address issues, and launch new features, all without disrupting the service. 

Cloud-native applications can be built, deployed and maintained quickly and efficiently, resulting in several benefits. These benefits include rapid innovation, quick response to market demands and the seamless delivery of superior user experiences. 

Cloud-native applications stand in contrast to two other types of software: traditional enterprise applications and cloud-based applications. Here are the key distinctions between them.

Cloud-native vs. traditional enterprise applications

Traditional applications use legacy technology designed to run on a mainframe or client/server environment rather than cloud infrastructure. These older enterprise applications are inflexible, making them difficult and expensive to scale up. When upgrades are required, pricey investments must be made in hardware and IT resources to install, configure and maintain them. In addition, with a limited amount of compute and storage resources available, legacy applications lack the automatic, near-infinite resource scalability of the cloud, resulting in costly inefficiencies as resources sit idle during times of low usage and reach or exceed capability during peak usage. 

Cloud-native vs. cloud-based applications

A step up from traditional applications, cloud-based applications have one foot in both worlds. These apps aren’t purpose-built for the cloud, but they tap into cloud-based resources such as compute and storage. This approach unlocks some of the benefits of the cloud, including higher availability and scalability. However, because cloud-based applications require hardware and software, they are slower and more cumbersome to deploy and manage, raising the possibility of service disruptions due to software or hardware-related upgrades and maintenance. 

Advantages of cloud-native applications

Cloud-native applications are an attractive choice for organizations seeking a modern approach to software development and deployment. This approach allows businesses to optimize their IT resources for efficiency and innovation, maximize cost-efficiency and create highly resilient, future-proof software solutions. 

Scalability

With a flexible architecture and automatic scaling of compute and storage, cloud-native applications are designed to accommodate future growth. Features such as container orchestration allow these apps to scale up easily and efficiently to meet increased traffic and workload demands.

Resilience and high availability

Cloud-native applications are resilient. These apps take full advantage of the highly distributed nature of the cloud and are often deployed across multiple cloud regions or data centers. Advanced features such as load balancing and self-healing capabilities ensure increased availability and reliability, minimizing the risk of hardware or software failures. They are built with fault-tolerant mechanisms such as redundancy, automatic failover and self-healing capabilities that minimize downtime and ensure high availability.

Faster development and deployment

Cloud-native development practices, including microservices architecture and DevOps automation, support rapid development and deployment cycles allowing app developers to bring products to the market faster. Using this approach, developers can work on smaller, independent components that allow them to make small, frequent updates and rapidly release new features. Development methods, such as CI/CD, accelerate the deployment process, significantly reducing the time and resources required to develop and deploy cloud-native apps.

Cost efficiency

Cloud-native applications are cost-efficient due to their ability to auto-scale based on demand. You only pay for the resources you use, unlike traditional infrastructure, where resources are provisioned statically and can become bottlenecked in times of high demand and cause overspending during low demand. Additionally, serverless computing, often used in cloud-native development, eliminates the need to manage servers, further reducing operational costs.

Flexibility and portability

Designed to be cloud-agnostic, cloud-native applications can run on any cloud provider or even on on-premises infrastructure. Containerized microservices allow these apps to work independently of any underlying operating system or hardware. This makes them portable and allows organizations the flexibility to choose the best cloud environment for their specific needs. 

Security

Cloud infrastructure such as Snowflake has multiple layers of security baked in. Cloud-native applications benefit from robust data and infrastructure security features, including dynamic data masking, end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest and more.

Pillars of cloud-native development

Here are the foundational elements involved in developing and deploying robust, efficient and adaptable cloud-native applications.

DevOps

DevOps is a software development methodology that enhances collaboration between development and operations teams. This design philosophy provides a framework organizations can use to accelerate the delivery of services and applications, including cloud-native apps. Closely aligned with the cloud-native model, DevOps practices enable organizations to rapidly innovate and adapt their software solutions to meet market demands. 

CI/CD

CI/CD is a DevOps best practice that combines continuous delivery and continuous integration practices. By automating large swaths of the build, test and deploy phases, CI/CD pipelines enable developers to move new code from a commit into production rapidly without sacrificing code quality and software security. Using a CI/CD pipeline, development teams can make changes to cloud-native application code, automatically test those changes and push them out for delivery and deployment. 

Containers and orchestration

Containers are the primary building blocks of cloud-native applications. These small, self-contained packages of software contain all of the app source code and dependencies required to run in any cloud environment. This provides a high level of flexibility and workload portability that streamlines app development and deployment. Many organizations use numerous cloud-native applications, making it virtually impossible to manually handle the provisioning, deployment, networking, scaling, availability and lifecycle management of containers. Container orchestration automates the tasks associated with deploying and running containerized applications, including cloud-native apps.

Serverless

Cloud providers such as Snowflake are fully managed services. The serverless model is an essential component of cloud-native application development and deployment. It removes the need for developers to manually scale and configure resources by automatically adding or removing resources, as required. This approach provides two advantages. First, it frees developers from managing underlying infrastructure, allowing them to focus their energy and attention on innovation and growth. Second, the serverless model is highly cost-effective, with organizations only paying for the resources they consume.

Build and run your cloud-native applications on Snowflake

Optimize the development and deployment of your cloud-native apps with Snowflake. Snowflake helps accelerate product velocity by making it easier for developers to build, test and deploy data-intensive applications. Compute resources are automatically scaled up and down for virtually unlimited concurrency without impacting performance. Snowflake’s fully managed service reduces operational burden, allowing your team to focus on developing and deploying cloud-native applications that deliver value to the business.